Haben speaking. Hello. I've told you I'm blind. It says in my bio that
I'm blind, but I frequently get pictures from people. Inaccessible
pictures and not just people from the internet. I have a family member
who regularly sends me photos and I have to remind them I'm blind. I
can't see the photo.

Please describe it. Photos are accessible when you add image
descriptions, there are features on social media is where you can add
image description, or you can just put it in the post or in the message.
Sometimes it's harmless photos. Other times it's health information.
It's a flyer for a social justice event, and I don't want to miss out
on, on those events and, and those conversations. Society puts the
burden on disabled people to make our world accessible. Society puts the
burden on us to educate the world on being more accessible. That's
ableism. Ableism is the systemic oppression of disabled people.

There are many layers to ableism. But at the core, it's the idea that
disabled people are inferior to non-disabled people. This idea comes
into healthcare, our schools, our workplaces, and our technologies. I
was talking to someone who is a native Tigrinya speaker from Eritrea,
and she told me if she wanted to say ableism in Tigrinya, she'd have to
use a whole sentence. That word doesn't exist in Tigrinya, which is
probably true for a lot of languages. Disability activists, all over the
world, especially in Africa, we need to coin our own words for ableism.
The word didn't always exist in English. Advocates had to create the
word and that can be done in other languages. For Tigrinya, Amharic,
other African languages, Asian languages. P It's not fair that the world
puts the burden on us. And that injustice is expressed through ableism.
Language has power. So I hope more people will join me in the movement
in identifying ableism, labeling ableism. So we can work to remove it.